Connecticut native discusses 'Life of Pi' Oscar win

Bill Westenhofer, winner of best visual effects for "Life of Pi" attends the Governor's Ball following the Oscars at the Dolby Theatre on Sunday Feb. 24, 2013, in Los Angeles. (Photo by Vince Bucci/Invision/AP)

The biggest winner at the 85th annual Academy Awards was "Life of Pi," which grabbed four honors, and one Oscar went home with Brookfield High School graduate Bill Westenhofer.

"It was pretty incredible," he said in a phone interview Wednesday morning from California, where he lives and works.

How sweet it was when Mr. Westenhofer held aloft the Oscar for Achievement in Visual Effects in pride for his Rhythm & Hues Studios team's stunning computer-generated imagery (CGI) work for the animated film adaptation of Yann Martel's book of the same name. And how bittersweet that his statement of support for the visual effects (VFX) industry, including Rhythm & Hues, which has filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, was cut short with swelling notes of music from the film "Jaws."

"We were told we had 45 seconds," he said, "but when other people had 60 or 75 seconds I thought I'd go for it" after expressing professional and personal thanks (his wife and parents, Anneliese and Don Westenhofer were among the gathering at the Dolby Theater).

Advertisement

"VFX people are artists, and they should be recognized for their talent," Mr. Westenhofer said.

This is the second Oscar and third Academy Award nomination for Mr. Westenhofer during his tenure with Marina del Rey-based Rhythm & Hues. His first win, in 2008, was for "The Golden Compass."

"The two of them look pretty good in the living room, and I couldn't resist doing curls with them," he said with a light laugh.

What were the chances of another Oscar for him and his VFX team?

"I was hopeful, of course. The last time I won I was the complete underdog," Mr. Westenhofer said. Other nominees for the award for Achievement in Visual Effects were "The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey," "Marvel's The Avengers," "Prometheus," and "Snow White and the Huntsman."

According to Mr. Westenhofer, about 1,000 people worked on the visual effects for 'Life of Pi." "We worked with people in 10 companies," he said.

Mr. Westenhofer, as "lead creative" is a visual effects supervisor at Rhythm & Hues and was the overall VFX supervisor for the 'Life of Pi' project.

"I had the world supervision task," he said, adding that his company's teams worked on the project in Vancouver, France and London and there were project teams in India as well.

Visual effects, he explained, is a different category than special effects. "Special effects are done on the set--for example, creating noise like real explosions but you don't do it for real. Visual effects are created through CGI [computer-generated imagery] on a computer."

"It took 10 years to get 'Life of Pi' done," said Mr. Westenhofer, noting that he and his team were involved for about three.

"The first year we did tests for Ang Lee, the director. He asked us what a digital [creation] would look like for a tiger because we had done the lion in 'Narnia,'" Mr. Westenhofer said. "The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" had earned him his first Academy Award nomination.

The next two were "intense," he said, adding that seven months were spent in Taiwan and India.

"A lot of time was spent in a wave tank," he said. "We got a theme park company to build it. No one did the open ocean swell before, and that's what Ang wanted."

Mr. Lee received the Oscar for Best Director, a category Steven Spielberg was expected to win for "Lincoln." The other nominees were David O. Russell for "Silver Linings Playbook," Benh Zeitlin for "Beasts of the Southern Wild" and Michael Haneke for "Amour."

"Spielberg was predicted to win, but when I heard murmurs that some people voted for Ang, I thought he might have a chance," Mr. Westenhofer said. "And I think he deserves it."

"Working with Ang was fantastic," he said. "He's fantastic human being. He cares about people and respects artists.

"He knows what he wants and he can communicate well," Mr. Westenhofer continued. "He lets people who work for him bring their creativity to the table." For example, he said, Mr. Lee asked for "an operatic sky" for when the zebra "was suffering," referring to the animation in the main character Pi's story about the sailor and the zebra, "and let us take it from there."

VFX was responsible not only for delivering the tiger and the sky but the ocean, the boat, and the other central elements that drove the story home.

According to the Los Angeles Times, the movie has earned more than any of the others that were nominated for best film, although the top film award went to "Argo."

"I know 'Lincoln' was the front runner for the award, but I think 'Life of Pi' will survive the test of time more than the other nominees," Mr. Westenhofer said.

(Roxbury resident Daniel Day-Lewis won the Best Actor award for his portray of Abraham Lincoln.)

How It All Began

For Mr. Westenhofer, a class of 1986 Brookfield High graduate, his interest in exploring art and technology was piqued by his art teacher, Kristine Tino, but he never thought he'd get into film-making, he said in an interview after his first Oscar win.

"Growing up in New England, it didn't seem possible to me. Living on the East Coast, I wasn't sure how to do it," Mr. Westenhofer recalled.

Even though he had a deep interest in art, he decided to pursue a degree in computer engineering, "to make sure I'd get a job," he said, "but I kept on with my drawing and painting."

Mrs. Tino, who retired in 2003, recounted that there weren't any computers in the Art Department at Brookfield High School when they were both there, so he undertook an independent study program with her. "He had a PC at home and I had a Mac at home, and that's how we worked--then we'd talk about things at school," the Sherman resident said in a previous interview. "Not only did he take off in computer art, but so did graphic design in the years since then."

After Mr. Westenhofer earned his degree at Bucknell University, he worked in software engineering for a while but "kept on taking courses in computer graphics." A trip to Disney World "inspired me to go back to it," he has said, recalling his excitement at seeing "animation being done by people in a 'fish bowl'--they all looked my age!"

Later, when he heard that a major annual graphic design conference was going to be held in Florida, he "went down and posted my work along with everyone else, and I got called," he said. Then "the fun began."

Early in his VFX career in the mid- to late '90s, Mr. Westenhofer worked on the movies "Waterworld" and "Stuart Little," and he has served as visual effects supervisor for "Speed 2," "Babe: Pig in the City," "Frequency," "Along Came a Spider," "Cats & Dogs," "Men in Black II," "Stuart Little 2," "The Rundown," "Elf," "Narnia" and many more films.

The "most fun," he said, was working on the 2009 science fiction comedy "Land of the Lost" with actor Will Ferrell. "He's a blast."

The progression from one project to another was not necessarily more technically challenging, he has said. "They weren't more difficult but different."

His involvement, he explained, is "in the post-production stage." Noting the complexity of the technology, he added, "An alteration in the angle of a single shot can mean up to seven man-weeks of work."

Life After 'Pi'

Not all film projects are such a mammoth undertaking as "Life of Pi," but they continue to be interesting for Mr. Westenhofer.

"We just finished 'R.I.P.D.,' with Kevin Bacon," he said, adding that his team is also involved with "'Percy Jackson (part two),' which is sort of Harry Potter-esque, and 'The Seventh Son.'"

As for the prospects of Rhythm & Hues and, more broadly, the VFX industry, Mr. Westenhofer said "the push in the film industry is to keep budgets low, and of course competition is increasing. The margins are so tight, but we broke even on 'Life of Pi.'"

Rhythm & Hues, according to Mr. Westenhofer, is "among the top five in the industry"--which, he said, includes ILM, George Lucas' company; Weta Workshop of New Zealand; Sony Imageworks; and Moving Picture Company of London--"and the only one solely privately company. That makes it tougher."

He said that Rhythm & Hues now has a workforce of 1,400 people worldwide, having grown from a five-member company in 1986.

"It's an artist-friendly and employee-friendly company," he said. "But they made one mistake, delaying in a business move" in consideration for its employees. "I'm hoping they can find a buyer soon before the talent starts getting picked off by others."

As an example of just how important that talent is, Mr. Westenhofer said, "It's ironic that this is when the top films are visual effects heavy."